Military veterans said it’s a slap in the face that immigrant recruits have quietly been kicked out of the Army after being promised citizenship — as the Department of Defense justified the branch’s actions by saying they were booted for legitimate reasons.
More than 40 servicemen have been given “uncharacterized discharges” in recent weeks after signing up to serve through Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, a special recruitment program that granted them a path to citizenship.
“They’re pretty much breaking promises to these guys,” said Mexican-born Army veteran Hector Barajas, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division between 1996-99 and was honorably discharged in 2001.
But the Defense Department said the 40 or so prospective enlistees were likely among 1,100 people in a “delayed entry program” and in the process of undergoing a “suitability review” that is similar to a background check.
“They weren’t actually in the service and they were receiving their adjudication from that process,” spokeswoman Major Carla Gleason told The Post. “For some reason those individuals, after that suitability review, were determined to be not eligible to serve in the Army.”
The unofficial policy was revealed Thursday in a report by the Associated Press and affects immigrants who enlisted in the Army through MAVNI, which launched in 2009, in hopes of becoming naturalized citizens.
Gleason said 10,000 non-US citizens joined or signed contracts with the Army between 2009 and 2017.
The AP reported that some servicemen were told they were labeled security risks for having family members abroad or because the Defense Department hadn’t completed their background checks.
Under the Trump administration, hundreds of recruits saw their contracts canceled last year, according to the AP. MAVNI was suspended in September 2017.
Margaret Stock, a a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the immigrant recruitment program when she was a professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, questioned the Defense Department’s explanation.
“They suddenly started discharging lots of people,” said Stock, who now works at as an immigration attorney. “Before there would be one or two here or there. … Now, there are whole bunch of people all at once with no explanation.”
Over time, Stock said the vetting requirements for MAVNI recruits has gotten so extreme they are were impossible to meet. “They think that anybody who is a foreigner in the ranks is a threat,” she said.
“It’s totally suspicious to me. What DoD is doing is a classic thing the bureaucracy does when they are trying to cover-up wrong doing. They claim national security, they say they can’t you tell you anything and then they do things that don’t make any sense like discharging a whole pile of people all at once and not telling them why they are discharging them. And telling the public they failed some background check,” Stock said.
“They are going through vetting from hell. It’s out of control.”
George Rufolo, 91, a World War II Navy vet and member of VFW Post 150 in Corona, Queens, said the recent discharges were flat-out wrong.
“It isn’t fair,” Rufolo said. “Why did you take them and then throw them out?”
In order to become citizens, the recruits need to serve for 180 days honorably, said Gleason.
The roughly 40 members who were affected had not undergone basic training or been deployed, she said.
“It wasn’t abrupt. All of these individuals have been in this program since at least September 2017 – since the program expired in September,” Gleason explained. “They knew they were waiting for some sort of adjudication one way or another.”
The “suitability review” is expansive and includes everything from criminal history and financial records to civil bankruptcy proceedings.
More rejections could be on the way.
“Eventually, all of those 1,100 will get an answer one way or another,” said Gleason.
Immigrant advocate groups also railed against the Army’s actions.
“The great immigrant purge continues,” said Pili Tobar, managing director of America’s Voice, a group that advocates for immigrant rights and policy reforms. “The same week we celebrate the 4th of July that honors America’s Declaration of Independence and the freedoms that so many have died to uphold, the Trump administration is aiming to strip citizenship from Americans, who pledge allegiance to the flag, and discharge from the military those who are prepared to pay the ultimate sacrifice for our country.”
He added, “The administration’s restrictive and ugly view of what it means to be an American is a direct challenge to our national motto of E Pluribus Unum – Out of Many, One.”
The New York Immigration Coalition blasted the military’s decision as “shameful and dangerous.”
“These immigrants chose to give back to the country they now call home. The United States military, and the country as a whole, have benefited immensely from the specialized linguistic to the medical skills of these recruits,” said Anu Joshi, the organization’s director of immigration policy.